The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

Overview

The City of God Against the Pagans (De Civitate Dei contra Paganos) is Augustine's greatest work and one of the most consequential books in the Western tradition. Written between 413 and 426, over the thirteen years following the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, it is a work of vast scope — part apologetic, part theology, part philosophy, part history — that Augustine himself described as the labor of his old age. The immediate occasion was the pagan charge that Rome had fallen because the abandonment of the old gods had deprived the empire of their protection. Augustine's response grew into a comprehensive account of the meaning of history, the nature of evil, the problem of divine providence, and the destiny of the human soul.

The book is massive — twenty-two books, running to more than a thousand pages in modern translation — and its structure falls into two major parts. The first ten books constitute an apologetic: Augustine refutes the charge that Christianity caused Rome's decline by arguing, first, that the old gods had never protected Rome and, second, that the true source of prosperity and security is the providence of the one true God. The second twelve books develop the book's central vision: the history of the world as the interweaving of two cities — the City of God and the Earthly City — from creation through judgment, with the destinies of both laid out in meticulous detail.

The book is the foundational text of Christian philosophy, and it established the framework within which Western theology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history would operate for more than a thousand years. Its influence is difficult to overstate: Thomas Aquinas, Kant, the medieval theorists of church and state, the Protestant Reformers, and the modern philosophers of religion all work in its shadow. For readers approaching the philosophy of God and the problem of evil, The City of God remains the essential starting point.

Key Ideas

The Two Cities

The book's central concept is the distinction between the City of God (civitas Dei) and the Earthly City (civitas terrena). Augustine defines the two cities not as political entities but as spiritual communities, distinguished by the objects of their love. "Two loves," he writes in one of the book's most famous passages, "have made two cities: the love of self, even to contempt of God, has made the earthly city; the love of God, even to contempt of self, has made the heavenly city." The City of God is the community of those who love God above all else and who order their lives toward the afterlife and the vision of God. The Earthly City is the community of those who love themselves above all else and who seek their good in the goods of this world — power, pleasure, glory, and domination.

The distinction is not between the church and the state, or between the sacred and the secular, though Augustine does discuss both. It is deeper and more radical: the two cities run through every human institution, every nation, and every individual. A person who is nominally a Christian but who loves the world more than God belongs, in Augustine's view, to the Earthly City, and a person who seeks God above all else belongs to the City of God, whatever their outward affiliation. The cities are, in other words, eschatological communities — defined by their ultimate loves and their ultimate destinies, not by their institutional memberships.

This has profound implications for the philosophy of history. Augustine reads the entire history of the world as the story of the interweaving of these two cities — from the fall of the angels and the creation of human beings, through the history of Israel and the coming of Christ, to the final judgment and the separation of the cities into their eternal destinies. History, on this account, is not a cycle (as the classical philosophers held) but a linear drama, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the meaning of the drama is the working out of God's providence through the conflict of the two loves.

The Problem of Evil and the Free Will Theodicy

The City of God contains Augustine's mature theodicy — his account of why a good and omnipotent God permits evil. The problem was urgent: the sack of Rome had produced suffering on a scale that demanded explanation, and the pagan charge was that the suffering proved the incompetence (or nonexistence) of the Christian God. Augustine's response is the privative theory of evil: evil is not a positive substance or a power opposed to God but a privation — an absence of good in something that ought to be good. Everything God creates is good, in the Augustinian view, and the existence of evil is not the creation of an evil substance but the corruption of a good substance.

This leads to the free will theodicy, which would become the dominant account of moral evil in the Western tradition. God created human beings with free will, Augustine argues, because free will is a greater good than the absence of evil. A creature that could only do good, that could never choose otherwise, would not be genuinely free, and the love and obedience of a free creature is more valuable than the programmed compliance of an automaton. The price of free will is the possibility of its misuse — the possibility of sin — and the evil in the world is, at bottom, the consequence of the free choices of creatures who have turned away from the good.

The account extends to natural evil — earthquakes, disease, and the suffering of the innocent — by tracing all disorder in nature back to the fall. Augustine held that the disorder and suffering in the natural world are not original but consequent on sin: the world was created good and harmonious, and the disharmony we now see is the result of the fall, which disrupted not only human nature but the natural order itself. This is the point at which modern philosophers — John Hick in particular — have parted company with Augustine, arguing that the evolutionary record does not support the idea of a originally perfect world that was later corrupted. But Augustine's framework, the idea that evil is privation and that free will is the condition of the highest good, remains the foundation on which later theodicies, including Plantinga's free will defense, build.

Providence and the Critique of Pagan Religion

The first ten books of The City of God are an extended critique of pagan religion, and they develop Augustine's account of divine providence in the process. The pagan charge was that Rome had prospered under the old gods and declined under Christianity. Augustine's response is twofold. First, he argues that the pagan gods never did protect Rome — that Rome's prosperity was due to natural causes, political skill, and the providence of the one true God, who gives good things even to those who do not acknowledge Him. Second, he argues that the pagan gods, if they exist at all, are not gods but demons — spiritual beings who have deceived humanity into worshipping them, and whose influence is not the source of blessing but of corruption.

The argument connects to a broader theological vision: the providence of God, on Augustine's view, governs all of history, including the rise and fall of empires. The prosperity of Rome was not a reward for pagan worship but a gift of God's providence, given for God's own purposes — to prepare the political conditions for the spread of the Gospel, to demonstrate that earthly success is not the highest good, and to show that all human glory is provisional. The fall of Rome, correspondingly, is not a sign that God has failed but a reminder that no earthly city is permanent, and that the true city — the City of God — is not of this world.

This account of providence is the foundation of the Augustinian philosophy of history. History is not, as the pagans held, a cycle of eternal recurrence — the same events repeating forever. It is a linear drama with a direction, governed by the providence of God, moving toward a culmination in the final judgment and the establishment of the City of God in its eternal form. The rise and fall of empires, the suffering of the righteous, the triumph of the wicked — all of it is comprehensible, on Augustine's view, only in the light of this providential order, and the philosopher who seeks to understand history must seek it there.

The Soul, the Body, and the Afterlife

The final books of The City of God address the destiny of the soul and the nature of the afterlife. Augustine argues that the human soul is immortal — not, he is careful to say, because it is divine in itself, but because God wills its continued existence. The soul's destiny is determined by its loves in this life: those who have loved God above all else will, in the afterlife, enjoy the vision of God — the beatific vision — which is the highest and final good, the fulfillment of all desire. Those who have loved themselves above all else will suffer eternal separation from God, which is the final form of the misery they have chosen.

The treatment of the afterlife is where Augustine's theology is most challenging to modern readers. His account of hell — eternal, conscious punishment — has been a stumbling block for many, and the later tradition, from Origen to Hick, has proposed alternative eschatologies. But Augustine's argument is that the justice of God requires the punishment of unrepented evil, and that the eternal character of the punishment reflects the gravity of the choice: the creature that has turned away from the infinite good has chosen an infinite loss, and the justice of God consists in giving the creature what it has chosen. The argument is not a sentimental one, and Augustine does not pretend that it is easy, but it is the framework within which the Western tradition, Catholic and Protestant, has mostly operated.

The treatment of the body is equally important. Augustine argues, against the Platonists, that the body is not the prison of the soul but a good creation of God, and that the final state of the blessed includes the resurrection of the body — not a disembodied existence but a re-embodied one, in which the body is restored to its original goodness and the whole person, body and soul, enjoys the vision of God. This is a distinctive Christian contribution to the philosophy of the afterlife, and it places Augustine at odds with the Platonic tradition, which treats embodiment as a falling-away from the soul's true home.

Structure and Style

The book is organized in twenty-two books, which Augustine himself divided into two groups. The first ten books (Books I-X) constitute the apologetic: the critique of pagan religion and the defense of providence. The second twelve books (Books XI-XXII) develop the theology of the two cities: the origin of the cities in the creation and fall of angels and human beings (XI-XIV), their development through history (XV-XVIII), and their final destinies (XIX-XXII). The structure is architectural — each section builds on the last — and the cumulative effect is of a single, massive argument about the meaning of the world.

The style varies. The early books are polemical and satirical, full of invective against the pagan gods and the philosophers who defended them. The middle books are exegetical and theological, working through the biblical narrative with Augustine's characteristic blend of literal and allegorical interpretation. The final books are eschatological and pastoral, moving toward the vision of the eternal city with a rhetoric that rises to the sublimity of its subject. The book is long, and it is not always easy reading, but it repays the effort: the argument is powerful, the vision is grand, and the prose, in R. W. Dyson's English translation, has a stateliness that matches the scope of the thought.

Legacy and Influence

The City of God is, with the Confessions, the most influential of Augustine's works, and one of the most influential books in the Western tradition. It established the framework for the medieval synthesis of Christian theology and classical philosophy — the framework within which Aquinas would work, the framework that the medieval theorists of church and state would elaborate, and the framework that the Protestant Reformers would inherit and revise. The distinction between the two cities became the basis for the medieval doctrine of the two swords — the spiritual and the temporal powers — and for the long debate about the relation between church and state that runs through Western political philosophy.

The book's theodicy — the privative theory of evil and the free will defense — remained the standard account of evil for more than a thousand years, and it is still the starting point for the philosophy of evil. The challenge to Augustine's framework — from Hick's Irenaean theodicy, from the evolutionary picture of a world that has always contained suffering, from the problem of hell — has produced one of the richest debates in contemporary philosophy of religion. But even the challengers work within the tradition Augustine established: they are arguing with him, not around him, and the terms of the debate — free will, the nature of evil, the scope of providence — are the terms he set.

For readers approaching the philosophy of God, the problem of evil, and the question of whether God exists, The City of God is the great text of the Western tradition — the book in which the Christian vision of reality received its most comprehensive philosophical articulation. It is not the last word, but it is the word against which every subsequent philosophy of religion must measure itself, and the weight of its vision, after fifteen centuries, has not diminished.